ARLENE AVAKIAN
Professor and Director
COURSES TAUGHT:
Introduction to Women’s Studies
The Social Construction of Whiteness

AMHERST, Mass. — Naomi Cairns was among the leaders in the privilege walk, and she wasn’t happy about it. The exercise, which recently involved Cairns and her classmates in a course at the University of Massachusetts, had two simple rules: When the moderator read a statement that applied to you, you stepped forward; if it didn’t, you stepped back. After the moderator asked if you were certain you could get a bank loan whenever you wanted, Cairns thought, “Oh my God, here we go again,” and took yet another step forward.

“YOU LOOKED BEHIND YOU and became really uncomfortable,” said Cairns, a 24-year-old junior who stood at the front of the classroom with other white students. Asian and black students she admired were near the back. “We all started together,” she said, “and now were so separated.”

Here is a small excerpt from this article, from the city journal, which you can link to above:

The Prep-School PC Plague

Heather Mac Donald

The diversity industry—the profession paid to harangue Americans about racism and sexism—has burrowed deep into the nation’s elite prep schools. Where private secondary schools once inculcated American citizenship and patriotism, today they employ diversity professionals to show students their complicity in an unjust society. Schools that strove to mold a homogeneous national elite now have enshrined “difference” as their organizing principle. Aping the fractured curriculum of the university, many prep schools offer courses in “gay voices,” the “construction of gender,” and “racial identity.”

This rush to import all that is divisive from the universities is a grievous missed opportunity to create an integrated, color-indifferent society. By all accounts, many students enter high school blissfully free of divisive race-consciousness. But rather than encouraging their students’ instinctive colorblindness, the private-school leadership is determined to snuff it out. Although few environments are less in need of anti-racism chest-beating than elite prep schools, directed as they are by well-meaning baby boomers deeply committed to their minority students’ success, many schools have established diversity bureaucracies for multicultural consciousness-raising. Sadly, that often means creating race-consciousness where none exists.

Bobby Edwards, the amiable dean for Community and Multicultural Development at Phillips Academy (also known as Andover) in Massachusetts, the country’s oldest boarding school and among its most prestigious, is a case in point. “I do more work than I anticipated around the race issue,” he says ruefully. Edwards teaches a tenth-grade required course called “Life Issues,” which immerses students in the holy trinity of university multiculturalism: race, class, and gender. Many pupils tell Edwards that race is simply not a salient feature in their lives. It will be once Edwards gets through with them, though. He informs his class: “Unless we work to help you have an understanding of the history around this issue, you won’t have a clear understanding of how you really do have a race issue.”

Most troubling to a diversity professional: even some “students of color” are skeptical of racism talk. “They say: ‘I don’t think there’s an issue when I go into a store,’ ” notes Edwards, incredulously. Rather than accepting the students’ reported experience, Edwards chides them: “Are you looking at the people following you around in the store?”

Other prep-school diversity bureaucrats report the same resistance to their message of “all racism, all the time.” Hugo Mahabir, head of multicultural concerns at the Fieldston Academy in the North Bronx, admits: “Students today think, ‘Adults don’t get it: we’re post–civil rights; we’re moving on to something else.’ ” They see explicit discussions of race, gender, and class as “divisive,” confesses Mahabir. Russell Willis, dean of multicultural affairs at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, Andover’s younger sibling and archrival, finds it “ironic” that some black students oppose affirmative action, since they benefit from it, he bitterly points out.

In a saner world, these little shoots of colorblindness would be encouraged to spread. A privileged independent school, especially a boarding school, is an ideal hothouse for nurturing them. With their arcadian campuses, rich endowments, and freedom to reject the pedagogical garbage peddled by government, ed schools, and teachers’ unions, private schools can create whatever sort of educational utopia they choose. So why not try something really radical: stop yakking about race and gender all the time, and see what happens when gifted young people of all races are encouraged to bond together. It’s not as if, when the graduates get to college, they’ll be starved for identity politics.

Prep-school difference-mongers set about their task by questioning the mental competence of students who say race is no big deal: such students must be ignorant or duped. The other possible explanation—that the students just don’t see much racism anymore—is not within the universe of diversity-think. According to consultant Glen Singleton, when black students claim that they have not experienced racism, that shows the “bias in the education they’re getting.” “They don’t know white privilege when they see it,” he huffs. Andover’s Bobby Edwards speculates that black color-indifference results from “indoctrination or the defense of assimilating.” Students of all races possess a “combination of optimism and naiveté” that leads them—mistakenly—to “attribute the race issue to an older generation,” he says.

Diversity monitors employ more hands-on tools as well for teaching guilt and resentment. A favorite is shopping exercises. Lisa Ameisen, a social-science teacher at the Baldwin School, once the finishing school for mainline Philadelphians, sends her students to Rite Aid to see what products are available for minorities. “If whites can buy 1,200 different kinds of foundation, how does that make you feel, if you can’t find any foundation?” she asks them. Ameisen presses her students to think of other consumer experiences that reflect societal inequity. When asked, however, she acknowledges that a store’s product line might reflect local demographics, not racism.

Ameisen is a crucial link in the transmission of university-level oppression theory to the prep schools. Her specialty is “critical whiteness studies,” a thriving academic field that seeks to expose how whites are unjustly privileged. Ameisen is a board member of the Multicultural Resource Center in Philadelphia, which for the last two years has been providing whiteness studies materials to schools in Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey; this February, she led a seminar in critical whiteness theory at the annual conference of the National Association of Independent Schools, the private schools’ main lobbying group. Expect prep-school whiteness classes to burgeon.

Shopping is a big deal for critical whiteness theory, and even faculty members get roped in. In 1997, an Andover administrator gave a faculty presentation on how dominant standards of beauty injure black women’s self-esteem; she had assembled several boxes of makeup, pantyhose, and greeting cards targeted to black and Hispanic consumers, from which white audience members had to make selections for their personal use. “It brought up a lot of discussion of what ‘nude’ means in pantyhose,” recalls presenter Veda Robinson, now a college counselor at the Buckingham, Brown, and Nichols school in Boston.

This is insane! What race that is the majority in their country isn't the "priveleged class?!??!" Why aren't they attacking the Japanese--who have only allowed about 5,000 to legally attain Japanese citizenship since WWII, compared to 10's of millions in the USA? Most countries are the same way, here's more hairbrained Liberal thinking to make the uniformed wring their hands over yet another contrived "wrong" that doesn't exist!

What about the negroes in Africa? Aren't they priviliged being the "majority" there? The more I see, the more I realize, the Jew/Liberals and their mouthpieces need to be destroyed as soon as possible!

Yeah, I was just about to post that link. It was on the page that comes up right after you sign out from your hotmail account, so who knows? Maybe a lot of people sympathetic to WN saw it too. We need a Stormfront popup that comes after every offensive article. In regards to the content of the article, I'd be proud to be standing at the front of the class after the "priviledge walk" they had to do. I'd thumb my nose at those in the back and inform them just who built the country (provided we had something like this in Canada and that I was taking University courses). I can't believe how the left guilts people.

Just another way the liberals force on white kids to enforce the belief that being WHITE is racist. I believe it is backfiring on them though, more and more WHITES are getting tired of hearing how they're the racist when all you hear is "its the white man's fault". They may teach it in school but reality teaches a different view.